SOURCE: Epel, Naomi. “Clive Barker.” In Writers Dreaming, pp. 31-42. New York: Carol Southern Books, 1993.

[In the following essay, Epel presents Barker's thoughts on dreams and their importance to the artistic process.]

When I asked a friend to characterize the work of Clive Barker he replied, “Sympathy for the devil.” He went on to explain that in Barker's works of “imaginative fiction” it is the monsters who are the good guys and the protagonists who are often dead.

Born in Liverpool, England, in 1952, Clive Barker grew up loving monsters. His initial ambition to be a painter was superseded by an attraction to the theater, where he created plays such as Frankenstein in Love, The History of the Devil and The Secret Life of Cartoons. Eager to portray things that could not be done on a stage, Barker switched to writing fiction. In 1984 he published six volumes of short stories entitled Books of Blood. Among the stories in that collection were “The Midnight Meat Train,” about a moving human abattoir running beneath the city streets; “Rawhead Rex,” about a baby-devouring monster; and “Sons of Celluloid,” the tale of a cancerous growth that spawned ghouls that resembled movie stars.

Barker is not afraid to break taboos. He delights in creating visceral images of sex, death and dismemberment. In his novels—which include The Damnation Game (1985), Weaveworld (1987), Cabal (1988), The Great and Secret Show (1989), Imajica (1991) and The Thief of Always (1992)—he constructs multileveled universes, mixing religious imagery and tales of secret knowledge with horror and humor.

Barker moved to Los Angeles in 1991 to pursue a filmmaking career. He made his directorial debut with Nightbreed and has produced several Hellraiser films.

My whole fiction is a fiction which deals with a kind of borderland between what we'll, for the sake of argument, call the real and the unreal. That is, my fiction both on the stage and later on the screen and in books is about a place where the dream life, that is so much a part of our being, invades the real and actually ends up changing it.

What I am doing in my work is drawing upon my own dream life, both waking and sleeping, as a starting place for the nature of those invasions. And making notes daily, nightly, about what images are coming into my head and how they seem to be rooted, on some occasions, in particular psycho-dramas of my own. And how very often, and these are often exciting times, they take off into territories which I can't find any starting place for in myself.

You know my first ambition was to be a painter and that's a craft or an art I still pursue. Very often dreams will give me an image which will be a starting place for a story or for a vision of some kind or other. And it will take sometimes a long time, in a few cases even years, before the narrative, which will be the best bedrock for that image, appears. But normally it comes along eventually. This isn't to say I don't have a backlog of images. I do. I can think of dozens and dozens of things that I want to write about, images I want to make sense of by putting them in a narrative context which I haven't yet found. But I have a kind of faith that that will eventually come along. I'll give you two separate examples—one a very violent visceral image and the other a kind of fantastical one.

The violent image: I've always had very sexual dreams. I think everybody has very sexual dreams. I did a story called “The Age of Desire,” which is about a man who becomes the guinea pig, the testee, for an aphrodisiac. Aphrodisiacs hitherto have not worked, but this one—this is the first one that actually works. It goes into his system and it goes wild. Not only does it go wild, it regenerates itself. Instead of being evacuated through the system, and weakening and diluting, it becomes stronger and stronger and stronger. And as the story goes on, this man's world becomes more and more sexualized. Everything becomes, somehow or other, a sexual image. And he ends up exhausted and dying of an excess of pleasure.

The idea of this highly sexual world began one midsummer in London, walking through the markets in Soho. There were fruit peddlers going through strawberries which had rotted. They were throwing away the rotted strawberries and keeping the good ones. The stench was overpowering.

That night I dreamt about this.

The whole place was somehow sexualized by the smell and the sight of these strawberries. And the doors and the windows—I needn't go into the Freudian connotations of the whole thing, it's pretty self-evident. The dream started out with almost a complete retread of what had actually happened that day, and then, in the way dreams do, it became an intensification of the experience.

Out of that dream came a kind of visceral dark image. And out of that scene came a story.

I also wrote a book called Weaveworld which is about a world in a carpet. I've often dreamt of puzzles and threads and labyrinths—again a very common image—and in this story I have a world which is literally woven magically into a carpet. Out of that image came, finally, a seven-hundred-page book. Obviously it developed and it developed and it changed but those are two places where images flowered into something.

Something wonderful happens in dreams which I always wished happened in reality more often. I think this is what an artist is trying to do when he or she is writing. You sense the metaphysics, the reasons for being, that underpin something.

In my dream of the rotting strawberries, suddenly what had seemed sensual, but only very, very vaguely sexual when it actually happened, became this extraordinary almost over-powering experience in the dream. And that made great sense to me. I suddenly thought, my God, supposing this were actually to happen! Supposing somebody were to actually be unable to dislocate himself from this intensity of sexual feeling. How scary that would be. How frightening and also how extraordinary.

So the dream becomes the starting place for a narrative and then you backtrack from that. You think, Okay, how can I make that work? You think, Ah yes, I'll make him a guinea pig for an aphrodisiac.

I spend most of my working day in some kind of dream state. That is to say, I get up from my bed, I shower, drink my coffee and go to my desk, which is literally ten yards from my bed. I then start, on a normal day, a process which will maybe take me eight or ten hours, writing about something that my inner eye is seeing. It's not like I'm getting up in the morning, as most people do, and stepping out onto the street and being slapped into the solid problem of how I get the car to start. Or whether the subway is crowded. Or how the boss is going to feel about me that morning. None of those things intrude.

I live alone. I don't have anyone to wake me from the reverie into which I've woken when I open my eyes. I don't get a double waking, I only get a single one. And, if I'm lucky, I plug back into this kind of—I'm not saying somnambulence—but I do think that if somebody were to secretly photograph me while I was writing, I'd probably look like a lunatic.

I know, for instance, I talk aloud, because other people have observed that. I know that my blink rate slows, because I can't wear my contact lenses when I'm writing. My eyes are just bang, wide open, staring at the page. I know that, very often, I look up from writing, and can't believe how much time has passed. I don't think these are particularly unusual things, by the way, I think this is true for a lot of writers. But I've deliberately simplified the act of writing. I don't have a computer, I don't have a typewriter. Everything is handwritten. It is the most primitive, and for me the most direct, association I can make between what's going on in my mind's eye, and what's going to appear on the page.

I think writing about an invented world is a dialogue with that invented world. There are clearly tensions which arise between the requirements of a character in terms of his or her natural propensity to want to go off and do his or her own thing and the requirements of the plot. Now I've read lots of writers talking about characters just taking off and doing their own thing—“The character took control of the book,” I'm sure you've heard that from writers. That never happens to me. Or, ten books on, it hasn't happened so far. That's because the dialogue that I'm having with characters as an ongoing thing is also a dialogue that I'm having with the shape of the plot.

I think that the major character in the books I write is the shape of the plot.

I value story above all else. I'm talking about my written work—in the movies I value the images—but in the books I value the story. A story has its own meaning. A story has its own significance. And sometimes the characters in that story can almost become transparent. This is true in fairy tales, for instance.

In a fairy tale it isn't important to know the precise significance of why the wicked witch is evil or why the evil queen is evil or why so and so is beautiful and good. They simply are. They have the force of archetypes. And what is important is the nature of their clash, not how they came to be who they are.

In the fiction of the fantastic, that can also sometimes be the case. Particularly toward the end of my books and short stories, characters take on an almost archetypal quality, which I seek out. I want characters to become almost purified by the act of fiction.

Dreams are full of these archetypal forms: people who come in cleansed of their ambiguities, coming in as purely sexual beings or as teachers sometimes. I have my dialogues on the page with those archetypal figures.

D. H. Lawrence said he didn't know what he meant until he wrote it down. I watch myself writing—that is I don't watch myself writing, I can only do it retrospectively. I think if you watch yourself writing probably the magic will have disappeared—but I write these things and I look at them and I think, Aha, that's what happened!

Do I believe the kind of thing that's been described in The Great and Secret Show: That our fears can take physical form? I doubt that frankly. At least not in the reality that we're presently occupying. Do I believe however that in certain states of consciousness the body becomes almost redundant and our spirit takes trips, visits states of being which are absolutely as valid as the reality which we are occupying? And that these can be arenas of education and healing? Yes, I absolutely believe that. And do I believe that in such conditions disparate spirits can meet and converge and maybe even learn from each other? Yes, I absolutely believe that.

We are born into this condition, slapped into this condition of the flesh, and it is a very dominant, dominating, domineering condition. It demands attention from us at the time. We get hungry, we have to pass wind, we need to make love, we get headaches and we bruise easily. There are so many facts of the flesh. So many things that the flesh demands of us, demands of our spirits. And, every now and then we are liberated.

Now, we can seek that liberation artificially. I have never been a great advocate of liberation through drugs, feeling perhaps in my own case as though my head was already a balloon on a thin thread and it would be dangerous to set fire to the thread. But I feel there are clearly other ways. Art is one such way. Sex, actually—which begins in the body but ends up in the spirit—can be another way in which we are outside of ourselves. Sleep, under certain conditions, can liberate us into another condition as well. And in those conditions flesh becomes less the fascist that it is. We're not thinking about hunger, and passing wind and the like, we're into a state in which ideas and images and maybe the spiritual presence of others, dead, alive, journeying, are also possibilities, presences.

That combination of images and fellow spirits is something which touches us all at certain times of our lives. And these things have an absolute reality, in the same way that memory has an absolute reality. Not only are they operating, they're actually helping us. Shaping us. Healing us. Making sense of experiences for us. Because experience as we live it moment to moment, day to day, is chaos, is disorder. It's information, most of which is entirely irrelevant to our personal drama, spilling in through our senses. Flooding us. And we have to somehow or other make sense of this.

Now the only way I can make sense of that is to say okay, I'm now going to take from my dreamscape certain images which, I would argue, predate even my birth. Primal things, things which belong to the spirit that I was even before I was even Clive Barker. And take those images and try to find a way that they make sense in this flood of material which is coming at me daily. Trying to find a way that they become islands in this incredible flood.

Writing is actually a means to use this material. I think it's important to say this isn't just crazy stuff which is just going through your head all the time, boiling up. It actually has purpose, it has reason, it has shape. And it's a valid way to understand yourself and the world and your relationship to the world.

I think the fear of insanity touches everybody who works in the imaginative arts, who is really plunging deeply into themselves. We're like people with one foot nailed to the floor. It hurts hugely to pull away from it. And actually, because we're born with a foot nailed to the floor, we're terribly afraid that if we pull too hard we'll either fall over or float away. And who's to say that isn't the case? I think there are dangers involved. Absolutely. Danger that if you pull too hard you will indeed float away and the bedrock of reality, which we have been brought up to believe is the only reality, will no longer be valid, and we'll just be crazies.

There's a balance that has to be absolutely struck, and that's a tough one. I think it's important to confess the fear, confess the anxiety, which I absolutely have—that if I ever let my imagination take over completely I would simply not be a rational individual any longer. That one of the things I value most in all the world, the communication of my vision to other people, would no longer be plausible because I'd be speaking gibberish.

I've never been a big fan of surrealism because the thesis of surrealism is that it should be a naked flowing of the artist's vision onto the canvas, or onto the page, without editorship, without anything coming between the artist and the communicating of that vision. Which seems at first an extremely admirable activity. But in fact what it becomes is an excuse for saying just about anything, painting just about anything. Because the subconscious is also full of a whole bunch of useless stuff. There's a lot of dreck in there which is not useful at all.

There's a lot of flotsam and jetsam floating around in the dream pool and it's a question of actually trying to make and shape the material which is most potent. So what I'm trying to do and which is keeping me—I was going to say sane, and that may not be too far from the truth—is finding the stuff which is genuinely useful to genuinely articulate something. Making sure the shapes that these images take have a narrative function, have a psychological function. And not simply indulging. I've never had a passion for abstract expressionist painting because, well okay so the paint goes all over everything, so what? What's important is that the colors be made to serve the shape and the purpose. Because art is about communication.

The business of art doesn't really begin until the thing is finished. Then the exchange begins. And the exchange is about saying, this is a piece of my mind, this is a part of my dreamscape—does it have any echoes for you, the receiver? Does this make any sense to you? And when, as I do, you take an extremely strange bizarre piece of your personal dreamscape, and put it in front of somebody, and they say, yes, this does make sense, the fear of insanity evaporates immediately. Because then you realize, that in fact this is part of us all. This is not some lonely, terrifying vista. This is part of a panorama that we all wander through. What can be more reassuring than the presence of other people there?

You don't even have to turn dreams into art. For some people the whole idea of turning something into art is going to be a source of anxiety because then you actually have the problem of what art is and whether you can achieve it and so on. But bringing it kicking and squealing into the light and seeing the value of metaphor in your life, talking about the value of metaphor, that's what's important.

So often I think people forget that we live two lives. That we live a physical life—which is about what we have to do during the day—and we live a spiritual life—which can also be very much about the day: the rites of our worship, the rituals of love, our fantasies about love and loss and so on. Those things can very much touch our day but they particularly come to light during the night. What's important is not to deny these things their meaning.

Now, the idea of putting those things into art is an important and interesting issue. But simply to talk about them as things which have meaning, which are intimate self-confessions is, it seems to me, the primary act. The secondary act is the turning it into art. And it may be something that people don't feel predisposed to do. But to simply say I am whispering to myself through the lattice of my consciousness, I am whispering to myself, I am telling myself, What is that thing? What are those many things? And saying, I don't mind what I hear. I don't mind, I forbid myself nothing. I forbid my subconscious and therefore my consciousness, nothing, is the beginning, I think, of great health.

I certainly think you should listen to your dreams, take account of them but don't be bound by “this is the way to interpret or decode your dreams” books. I think there's a whole bunch of books out there teaching people, in almost encyclopedic fashion, the significance of each symbol. I think that's nonsense. Water means a different thing for somebody who doesn't like wine than it does to somebody who almost drowned as a kid. I think you have to look at what it means in your personal scenario.

This is an almost meditative activity, it seems to me. It's a question of sitting quietly with yourself and saying, the only company I have really in all the world is the person I am. And everything else can go away from me, everybody else can go away from me. It is within the bounds of possibility that all the people I love most in the world could be gone tomorrow. I have to be at peace with this myself. And a third of this “myself” is a sleeping self. An important third, perhaps the most important third. So let me be quiet with myself and sit with myself and like myself, and what my subconscious is telling me.

The key thing in my life—and it's taken me a long time to realize this—is that as a child you are given dream time as part of your fictional life. Into your hands go the books of dream travel, Dorothy's dream travel, the Darling family's dream travel in Peter Pan, the children of Narnia. You're given books in which children with whom you identify take journeys which are essentially dream journeys. They are to places in which the fantastical not only happens, but is commonplace. Alice falls down a hole, the Darling children take flight, the tornado picks up Dorothy's house. These children are removed and taken to a place which is essentially a place of dreams.

And then, at the age of five or something like that, they start to teach you the gross national product of Chile. And you're left thinking, Wait! What happened to Oz and Never-Never Land and Narnia? Are they no longer relevant? One of the things you're taught is No! they are no longer relevant. They are, as it were, a sweet introduction to the business of living. And now comes the real stuff—so get on with it.

You're going to be taught to compete, very often for spurious reasons. You are going to be taught that the accrual of facts, however unimportant those facts are, will somehow make you better and more able to deal with the world. You're going to be told that the only way the world works is through the waking life in which you get enough money to get a second Porsche. Or indeed a first.

All those things are lies.

It took me until my mid-twenties 'til I realized that I should not be ashamed that I loved Oz more than I loved the gross national product of Chile. And I realized that in doing that I was setting myself up absolutely as a potential idiot, as a potential fool. I realized absolutely that there were going to be an awful lot of people who were going to look at me and say, this guy's a dreamer.

You know the word dreamer is pejorative in our culture. The word fantasy is pejorative. These are things that we should not be. We should not be dreamers, we should not be fantasists in our culture.

What I realized was that I was not ashamed that I still trip to Never-Never Land. Because I think I come back a better person, a more centered person and a person who could be better in the world. I could be better to my friends; I could be better to my relatives. I could just be a better person.

And so now at dinner parties when people say, “So what's you're favorite part of the world?” and I say, “Never-Never Land” and they choke on their soup, I smile to myself and say, that's cool. I don't mind that. If that's the way it has to be, that's the way it has to be.

Have the confidence of the trip and nobody can ever take it from you. Because it belongs to you from the very word one. It belongs to you.